Performance Comparison

As usual, we are going to compare the mainboards speeds in two different modes: in nominal mode and during CPU and memory overclocking. The first mode is interesting because it shows how well the mainboards work with their default settings. It is a known fact that most users do not fine-tune their systems, they simple choose the optimal BIOS settings and do nothing else. That is why we also run a round of tests without interfering in any way with the default mainboard settings. We deliberately ran the tests in the same conditions as our Intel H55/H57 Express based mainboards reviewed previously, that s why we could use those results for comparison purposes today. The mainboards are listed on the diagrams according to their performance (from high to low). The results of Intel DH57JG mainboard are marked with a darker color for your convenience.

We started using the recently released Cinebench 11.5 program version. All tests were run five times and the average result of the five runs was taken for the performance charts.

We have been using Fritz Chess Benchmark utility for a long time already and it proved very illustrative. It generated repeated results, the performance in it is scales perfectly depending on the number of involved computational threads.

A small video in x264 HD Benchmark 3.0 is encoded in two passes and then the entire process is repeated four times. The average results of the second pass are displayed on the following diagram:

In the archiving test a 1 GB file is compressed using LZMA2 algorithms, while other compression settings remain at defaults.

Like in the data compression test, the faster 16 million of Pi digits are calculated, the better. This is the only benchmark where the number of processor cores doesn’t really matter, because it creates single-threaded load.

There are good and bad things about complex performance tests. However, 3D Mark Vantage has become extremely popular. The diagram below shows the results after three test runs:

Since we do not overclock graphics in our mainboard reviews, the next diagram shows only CPU test from the 3D Mark Vantage suite.

We use FC2 Benchmark Tool to go over Ranch Small map ten times in 1280x1024 resolution with medium and high image quality settings in DirectX 10.

Resident Evil 5 game also has a built-in performance test. Its peculiarity is that it can really take advantage of multi-core processor architecture. The tests were run in DirectX 10 in 1280x1024 resolution with medium image quality settings. The average of five test runs was taken for further analysis:

As you can see, Intel DH57JG takes a leading position in each of our tests. In some of them it is only inferior to the Biostar board which works at higher frequencies than most other mainboards. Thus, Intel DH57JG would be the fastest if we had the same test conditions for each mainboard. Moreover, Intel DH57JG won the 7-Zip compression test despite the Biostar’s advantageous settings. This test is influenced not only by the CPU frequency but also by the memory subsystem parameters. The CPU frequency was the same on each mainboard, save for the Biostar, and all of them fell behind the Biostar with the exception of Intel DH57JG. This indicates that the latter has some memory optimizations. Thus, the Intel mainboard has a small but clear advantage in performance, yet it may turn to be a downside: we could not set low memory timings on this mainboard and increase its performance during overclocking.